Xmen. Yeah. It sucked
I saw it on opening day at midnight. Boy.. that was a let down… but I found this on the WoW Boards. Posted by a fellow named Logash
Warning SPOILERS!
Bah. Guild drama FTL.
Yeah. Stupid Staff of Dominance screwed up my guild.
I would post about what happened.. but I’ve already typed it all out like 5 million times on the guild forums. Anyway. I got hosed because someone thought that priests are just healbots and I’m a retard or something like that.
Kublacon
Ah, the bliss of having a 4 day weekend… and the bliss of blowing 600 bucks on a weekend full of boardgames and Shadowfist….
We end up driving down to Kublacon from Sacramento at around 9 o clock. I pack a ltitle overnight bag with some changes of clothes, a box of shadowfist, and trunk full of games, meet up with Kat and Kris, and cruise down to the con. Score myself a sweet parking space (which of course I refused to leave until Sunday when I left) and started the mayhem.
Some con highlights:
- Scoring 257 points in Ticket to Ride: Marklin. Blew away the competition
- Getting enough KublaBucks to grab a free copy of Shadows over Camelot. Thanks to: John, Quyen, Max, and Erik Berg for donations.
- Picking up a couple new games: No Thanks!, Duel of Ages (5 buck special), and the last 4 precons i needed for the current magic block
- Playing a magic grab bag event and having my deck where my Most Valuable Card was Benalish Hero. That and beating the deck with 10 (x) burn spell spels. Boy my deck was a pile.
- Getting to try a couple of new games like fairy tale (zman) and Taj Mahal (don’t know who makes it, but its a knizia game).
All in all, thought he con was expensive… and kind of dead this year… I still had fun. I’ll probably return next year.
Kublacon
Yep, this memorial day weekend means another installment of kublacon. A perrenial favorite bay gaming con that has stood the test of time. We (meaning my game playing group), used to go to a whole slew of cons, like dundracon and conquest, but as time went on and we got older and wiser, and more intolerent of sucky cons, kubla is the only con most of us visit anymore. Which is basically the only time I get to see people that used to play at Ballpark.
Anyway, this year will see the curious absense of Jan, as he will have moved (heck. he’s already gone.) Which means the dueling champeeonchip that he wins every year will be up for grabs. I’ll probably enter the deck everyone hates again. Just for kicks.
Which brings me to what I am bringing to the con this year. I’ll probably bring the same decks from last year.. maybe i’ll even give em a quick once over. Shadowfist just is interesting me less for now. I still have to figure out my itenerary.
Rant: PVP sucks.
For those of you who don’t know about the honor system for WoW, it basically is a bell curve combined with a seeding system. Basically if you pvp more than everyone else in a given week, then you get a ton of rating points. You need a certain theshold of rating points per rank. Then after that, you decay like a quarter of your existing points. What this amounts to is this: People who want to get to the highest rank have to get in the top 10 consistantly, and High Warlord must be 1st in standings two weeks in a row. Then you get the nightclub on fire syndrome. Everyone wants to be #1 at the same time, so they all pvp and refuse to stop pvping, leading them to artifically escalate the number of Honor that everybody needs to have. Which forces them to pvp more. We call it honor compression over here.
Which translates to: Reyia doesn’t get to pvp because you have a bunch of other assholes who want to stroke their e-peen and clamor for #1. So they end up spending entire days pvpin’, leaving other people out who want to participate. Which is me this weekend.
I spent around 18 hours waiting to pvp (including 6 hours from 6am to 12pm on Sunday morning), and getting passed up because people who were more established and had more connections than I wanted to. I’ve been sitting at 8% of rank 8 for several weeks, though steadily declining, because I cannot get in to a group. On our server, there’s no point to pvping unless you are in a set group. PUGs (pickup groups) suffer from retardation syndome, as everyone in a PUG think’s they’re l33t and don’t need anyone else, and don’t listen to basic strategy, because people think they pwn everyone by themeselves (of course, they still bitch at you when they don’t receieve heals, twice as much if you were either across the map, or dead because they sat their wanking instead of hitting the guy that is hitting the healer). You just get rolled by a team over and over again.
As the set group is the way to go… there are usually 3-4 running. I know most of the people who start them, and i have a good reputation (IMHO) as a priest that makes people win (I’m really not trying to stroke my e-peen… I just know the role of the priest… and happen to do that well… as opposed to people who just want to melt face and not help the team). The game of choice of Warsong Gulch, as you can roll a team at 6-11 minutes (basin gets to around 14-29 minutes, with the average to be around 20 minutes).
The problem is this:
- Priests don’t get very many contribution points as they really aren’t on the front lines pwning stuff. They are escorting the flag and pushing through (imagine a linebacker throwing screens), or a base defender with the flag (again.. a linebacker defending a running back). They are away from most of the pwnage… therefore not getting many CP’s from kills.
- Priests get focused fired down, because the good (and bad teams) know that killing the priest first is a good thing. You don’t get cps when dead.
- The ideal group set-up includes 1, and at most 2 priests on a 10 man team (usually 1/2 priests, 1/2 druids, the rest dps, perferably 2 or more ranged burst dpsers… like mages or warlocks.)
What this means is:
- Since there are usually 2-3, and at most 5 groups running, there is only really demand for 4-6 priests.
- One of the groups is run by a priest, and she thinks that only 1 priest is necessary.
You can see where this is going.
I mean I love PvP. It’s a challenge, but it isn’t a huge 6 hour investment in one big chunk. It’s dynamic content that is a lot of fun. However, the way blizzard has set up the games, the investment vs reward is quite low for a priest. My ultimate goal was rank 11… which is where you got a horse. None of the gear is that good, even if you hit rank 14. Now if you are a melee dps guy, the gear is basically +100% effectiveness. The gear for a priest… well… I would say it makes me around 10%. It just has to do with the way Blizzard rewards smashing things with a stick. Yay.
Basically I’m at rank 8, and totally burnt out on the way shit works if you’re a caster, or heal… Priest’s get the double whammy. They really need to make it rewarding for a support class to play, considering that its hard enough to play when groups only want 1 of you.
I should just roll a fucking warrior. Oh wait. I have one. He’s level 30.
Why hasn’t anyone thought of:
Fax over ip? I mean.. sure… you have a scanner… But why hasn’t anyone made a stand alone device that sits on a network, and can scan a document, digitize it, and either email it in a special format to a hostname or fax it to another one of these machines?
I mean.. I guess you might have a spam problem… but you could create a whitelist… and suddenly you have a good interoffice communications tool.
Haha… Watch. Someone is going to come and look on my blog… and steal the idea… Good thing that my blog entries are timestamped. Of course I’m sure someone at Xerox already thought of this and my idea is an infringement of some patent they own.
Rant- “People f’ckin suck”
Yeah… so last night (and most Tuesday nights) my guild runs MC. We’re a fairly good bunch, and we can usually get up to domo in 1 run, pushing the pace even though we’ve only been doing MC for like 2 months. To get this fast, we really push the pace on things, chain pulling whenever possible.
Last night, I’m in group 3, with one of the off tanks, as well as a couple of other peoples. During a long set of chain pulls… one of the mages go down aoeing imps. Fairly common thing to happen… they pull aggro of 10 imps all at once, get hit for ton, and go down. Not much you can do about that… So I res the guy, throw a renew on him, then have to immediately deal with the next string of chain pulls.
So the guy starts screaming for fort… I admit, I missed it, considering he’s using party chat instead of raid chat… and I’m trying to keep everyone alive…. but as soon as we get out of this chain pull madness… I give him a fort.
Of course… he decides to be an asshole.
I blacked out his name, because I’m not the kind of person to do that… but it just pissed me off. Of course he didn’t get moved from my group at all… Let’s just say that he’s a mage. A fucking mage that has to deal with just not getting his own dumb ass killed from nuking too much… who simply has to assist the Main assist and hit his fucking 2 buttons
and maybe sit and drink once in a while.
I’m sure I’m under-valuing the mage game and I really am not saying playing a mage is easy or anything. I don’t mean to offend the mage community. In fact most of them are very fun to talk to and highly skilled players. I’m just frustrated at one of their members giving me shit for keeping 40 damn people up and running. I don’t need this shit from anyone.
Some people say whispercast is cheating and I should learn to play my class… those people need to STFU and get with the program. Watching 40 bars for 6 hours and being on constant alert for that time to watch out for problems is really a lot of work. Anything to ease the additional burden of making sure every single person is buffed up on top of that helps make the raid go faster and relieves some of the stress off the healers. Constant calls over vent of fort me slow things down… “fort me!” me:”whose me?”
On a positive note =), I did get to talk to a couple of new people in my raid, and another mage that knew WTF was going on and we had a nice chat about talents and stuff… it was fun =). He also happens to know one of the other priests irl that has been throwing off a lot of the other healers by crosshealing like a mofo. He thinks that he’s reasonable enough to talk to about. I mean I don’t want to be an asshole that tells other people they suck and they need to play my way… Gotta find a good way to broach the subject.
Railroad Tycoon and the new Magical cards set.
Got some gaming in this weekend. Went down to my friend John’s house, hoping to meet up with a mutual friend whose leaving for NYC, and hoping to catch Quyen for some gaming. Well… according to an email I got later, Quyen is in… well… you guessed it. NYC. Jan couldn’t come because he was going to some party at night.
John and I got some games in with the new card set, Dissension. It’s fairly interesting. Both of us are fairly blown away with this current cycle of cards (Rav,Pact,Diss) Most of the cards are fairly interesting, yet deep, yet powerful. Lot of fun really. If I was a couple of years younger, and had a more money, and wasn’t already addicted to World of Warcraft… I might be persuaded to play seriously again.
Anyway… I finally got a chance to play a game of Railroad Tycoon, the board game. Let’s just say… the game is freeking humongous. Bigger board than WoW:TBG by another 50 percent. It comes with all these little cool track hexes and little trains. Anyway… we got a 5 player game going. The rules are very simple. Only took me 15 mins or so to explain everything. Strategy was harder. I made sure to read the little strategy blurb in the manual to everyone before continuing.
So I go on to try to do exactly what the manual tells me to watch out for… dominating the northeast. I go into some serious early game debt trying to fight for it, leading me to be the first to get to 5 shares, and end up unable to ship anything for several turns. Then suddenly, I upgrade my engine to level 3, then level 4, and start chewin it up… leaving everyone else in the dust.
I end up taking by far the most shares… (13) by the end of the game, with the next being like 5 shares, and then the lowest being 2 shares. A lot of players were very conservative, making 2-4 link deliveries, where as I went straight for 5 to 7 link deliveries between the northwest. It looked like I had a huge commanding lead, but in the end, after we tabulated the points… I was ahead by 8 points, 5 of which were gimmee points that were given to me because I got lucky with a railroad operation card that came up.
All in all, I think everyone had fun. Most people put it in the light heavy kind of category (both in weight and time investment), but the rules weren’t nearly as stupid as wowtbg was. I’m hoping I get more people to play. I’m hoping other people pipe in and give me their input.